IPFire is a versatile firewall distribution that is also running on the ARM architecture. However, the ARM architecture is very much different from x86 hardware that many people are used to. This section on the IPFire wiki takes care about which hardware is supported.
What to buy?
Before buying the first ARM single board computer, please take a moment to find out which one is actually supported by IPFire. Note that ARM support is difficult to handle and very fragile. It may require at least some advanced skills with IPFire and/or Linux.
Discontinued Support for 32-bit ARM
The IPFire Development team will discontinue building for 32-bit ARM (i.e., armv6l) on Feb 28, 2023.
Known Problems affecting all ARM boards
There are some problems which are affecting all ARM boards. Most of them are bugs which are known to the developers, but require special effort to be fixed or cannot be eliminated for another reason.
Please check out the following list of bugs before reporting a new bug in the bug tracker.
HWRNG not recognized
Some ARM boards have a hardware-based random number generator (HWRNG). IPFire neither recognizes nor uses them at the moment. For further details, please see the individual descriptions of the ARM boards.
Single Board Computers
| CompuLab | ||
|---|---|---|
| ██ | Trimslice | |
| ██ | CompuLab Utilite | Missing bootloader & kernel support |
| ██ | CompuLab Utilite2 | |
| Friendly Elec | ||
| ██ | FriendlyElec NanoPi R1 | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| ██ | FriendlyElec NanoPi R1S H3 | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| ██ | `FriendlyElec` NanoPi R1S H5 | |
| ██ | FriendlyElec NanoPi R2S | |
| ██ | FriendlyElec NanoPi R2C (plus) | |
| ██ | FriendlyElec NanoPi R4S | |
| ██ | FriendlyElec NanoPi R5S + others | not supported |
| Globalscale Tech | ||
| ██ | Globalscale Dreamplug | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| ██ | Globalscale SheevaPlug | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| ██ | Globalscale Mirabox | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| IOMEGA | ||
| ██ | iconnect | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| Lamobo | ||
| ██ | Lamobo R1 aka BananaPi Router | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| LeMaker | ||
| ██ | LeMaker BananaPi | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| ██ | LeMaker BananaPro | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| Xunlong OrangePi | ||
| ██ | Xunlong Orange Pi R1 Plus | |
| ██ | Xunlong Orange Pi R1 Plus LTS | |
| ██ | Xunlong Orange Pi PC2 | |
| ██ | Xunlong Orange Pi Zero Plus | |
| Raidsonic | ||
| ██ | icy-box | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| Raspberry Pi | ||
| ██ | Raspberry Pi 5 | currently not supported |
| ██ | Raspberry Pi 4 Model B | Hardware Revision 1.4 / 1.5 is currently not supported |
| ██ | Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ | |
| ██ | Raspberry Pi 3 Model B | |
| ██ | Raspberry Pi 2 Model B | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| ██ | Raspberry Pi (One) B and B+ | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| Sinovoip | ||
| ██ | BananaPi M1 | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| ██ | BananaPi M2 | |
| ██ | BananaPi M3 | |
| SolidRun | ||
| ██ | ClearFog Base / Pro | Needs extra u-boot & u-boot env settings. |
| ██ | ClearFog Pro | Should work like ClearFog Base - no reports |
| ██ | CuBox-i | No working bootloader. |
| ██ | Hummingboard | No working bootloader. |
| Wandboard | ||
| ██ | Wandboard Solo | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| ██ | Wandboard Dual | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| ██ | Wandboard Quad | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| Others | ||
| ██ | Pandaboard | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
| ██ | Cubieboard Cubietruck (Cubieboard 3) | 32-bit ARM discontinued 1 |
Legend
- ██ - Very well supported.
- ██ - Basic support. Various drivers may be missing, unstable or not working.
- ██ - Does not work.
- ██ - Does not work and no support planned.
Development
There is a mailing list which is the first place to contact other people working on the ARM port of IPFire or being interested in supporting that at: sig-arm@lists.ipfire.org